


la nouvelle bête

by smithens



Series: héloïse [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Canon Era Fusion, Friendship/Love, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-07
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-08-20 00:40:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8230253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smithens/pseuds/smithens
Summary: It is 1828.Courfeyrac is heir not to a throne, but a dragon.He suspects his aunt would not have made him sole beneficiary, had she known the inheritance would become a republican.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Began as fills for Tumblr prompts from PilferingApples, is now steadily morphing into something more. :) Expect minifics in the same verse from time to time!

“Aha, Jolllly - I hoped you might be here! while this striking young lady and I were out, I considered again what I told you before,” said Bahorel, as he gracefully dismounted an exotic, ruby-scaled beast which Joly was quite certain he’d never seen or met in his life,  “about your little affair, you know the one, and she and I have reached a surprising conclusion!”

After backing several paces away, Joly stood frozen as Bahorel blithely offered the dragon a bundle of lucerne, which it refused with an indignant, smoky snort, and then a cone of sugar, which it ate very greedily, nearly teething upon Bahorel’s gloved, flexed-flat hand in the process. He then patted her snout and began to remove her harness as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world to untether a giant dragon. 

It had taken Joly several years and far too many drinks to learn that Bahorel's conception of "reasonable" was not at all equivalent to his own.

The dragon stood very still, although she appeared rather like a cat about to pounce. This did nothing to assuage the pounding of Joly's heart; when he finally found his voice, he managed only to squeak, “I’ve only become accustomed to your riding the _locals_ in the last month, and -”

“- o! come now, I _did_ tell you it is a regular pasttime in Gascony -”

“- well! this is Paris! but now you are flying off on - on foreign varieties?”

The dragon, now unrestrained, turned her head and blinked at him, very slowly. Joly closed his mouth and swallowed - she was quite a bit bigger than the Parisian beasts, which after several years of cultural adjustment still seemed monstrous, and the feline-sized, ankle-nipping dragons local to his hometown of Valence and its surrounding areas were not at all comparable.

“She’s Basque,” Bahorel said, as though this explained everything - and perhaps it did _to him_ , thought Joly, but a dragon so large as that would have been inexplicable even were it not a mere ten paces away from him. Bahorel whistled to her, and they began to walk together toward the stable - as the dragon moved, her scales glimmered. “Very well-mannered, too, and prissy. Unsurprising, as Courfeyrac has inherited her.”

“Oh,” Joly replied, feeling like he ought to go lie down. “Well. Eh - she is a beauty, at least.”

Abruptly, she stopped walking and breathed some sparks in his direction, her wings unfurling enough to flutter in what Joly hoped was happiness. He thought to step away again, then thought better of it and ran after them both, praying that the dragon wasn't hungry.

Bahorel, seeing this preening and change of heart, grinned at him. “See, you’re endeared to her now! she possesses the de Courfeyrac vanity. You will be friends in no time. In any case, regarding - what was her name - Musichetta…”


	2. Chapter 2

“Now that I have both of you with me - have either of you yet been acquainted with Héloïse?”

In spite of the circumstances, Courfeyrac’s good cheer was nonetheless contagious: Feuilly found it difficult to maintain his apprehension. It helped, also, that Enjolras seemed as calm as he could be - or perhaps he was merely stoic. (At times Feuilly could not easily tell.)

“Héloïse,” Feuilly repeated, for that was not the name by which Jean Prouvaire had called her, which had sounded Greek and ancient - but Prouvaire had a way with him about names. Enjolras gave a curt shake of his head, and Courfeyrac grinned. The dragon, who was lounging in the grass some paces behind Courfeyrac, slowly opened one eye.

Feuilly could not meet her gaze.

“Then, my good men, may I present her to you," Courfeyrac pronounced, with an air of grandeur, “she is yet unaccustomed to making friends of your species, although she _has_ taken quite a liking to our Jolllly, I heard!”

In response to this, Héloise exhaled a little puff of smoke, stood, moved forward a little, and then finally unfurled her wings to give them two brisk flaps. Even in the evening overcast, her red body glimmered as though bathed in sunlight; her great size and beautiful coloring were greater, even, than majestic. She was haughty.

She looked to Feuilly, and this time he looked at her, too, and finally his fear left him - then she looked to Enjolras, who bowed his head. (His hair, too, glowed even without sunlight to illuminate it.)

“Hullo, Enjolras, there is no need to be timid,” said Courfeyrac, like he was telling a joke rather than telling off, and Enjolras appeared to smile - but he did not look up, and in fact uncrossed his arms to hold them behind his back.

And then it seemed something had happened between them, man and dragon: Héloïse, who had held her head high, her glimmering neck bared, closed her eyes (Feuilly had not even realized the creatures had eyelids), and then lowered herself so that her snout was nearer to the grass.

Feuilly remembered suddenly that he heard a tale a long time ago - probably upon his arrival in the city when he was eight or nine  - that said, in essence, that dragons were not meant to be feared, for they could be easily charmed. At the time he had doubted: to control a dragon would take a lifetime, he had heard, and the beastly Nemausian dragons were proof enough of this. (Though they, like most other dragon populations in the Midi, had been chased centuries ago to stay in the mountains, leaving the valley for humanity.) The Algerian creatures, which could every other spring be seen flying overhead to spend the warm season in the Cévennes, seemed wilder still. Perhaps they had some degree of conscience, but they would never be civilized.

His mind since then had changed, and as he traveled for work in his youth he came across many varieties of dragons, but he had never seen a man charm one - as though with magic.

Enjolras lifted his head, and then so did Héloïse, and Feuilly found himself staring as the two of them met in the middle, and Enjolras began to pet her head.

“I am not timid,” said Enjolras, touching his knuckles behind Héloïse’s ear, “merely curious.”

Courfeyrac caught Feuilly’s gaze just as he managed to turn his head from the strange interaction before him.

“Bravo, my friend, but you have perturbed Feuilly,” Courfeyrac said, presumably to Enjolras, although he was giving Feuilly himself a fond look. “He is not from your part of the south. He doesn’t know of your talents.”

Feuilly felt his cheeks warm.

“If anyone could do it, it would be Enjolras,” he said to himself, but Courfeyrac must have heard, for he started to laugh again.

“If only he would try with human women, as I keep saying, he might be more-”

“Does Hélöise have political inclinations?” Enjolras said suddenly, and beside him the dragon lifted her head once more, prideful.

“Er,” said Courfeyrac, shifting from side to side, “you could enquire? She belonged to my aunt, although was never truly hers, you see, but of course, Bahorel has been assisting with her, and as we discussed, she is very loyal if one is…”

Courfeyrac trailed off.

Enjolras looked at Héloïse, who was lifting her wings again in what could have been a flutter in a smaller animal, reflecting what little sunlight there was as she did so, and then turned toward Feuilly himself.

“We can cooperate with her, I think. If you are comfortable, Feuilly, I should like your assistance in the task. You have more to offer than you know.”

Feuilly stared.

“That is… I -”

“We’ll discuss it later, if you prefer,” Enjolras added, with a gentle, insistent smile. “For now I suspect Courfeyrac has much to do.”

And he gave one last stroke along the back of Héloïse’s neck, and then stepped away, with a gesture toward Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac, in response, shrugged.

She looked between the two men, then looked directly at Feuilly, and moved her head up and down as though she were agreeing with something he had said - but of course he had said nothing - and with a swish of her tail, took several paces backward.

Although Feuilly was still not certain what he needed to assist with, let alone what he might have to offer, he nodded in return. In a moment, Héloïse - he knew he could not again think of her as ‘the dragon’ - leapt, and then she was in flight.

Feuilly was not certain of what he had managed to get himself into.

He suspected he would find out soon enough.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lead-in. :)

By his third evening in Héloïse's company, Joly had acquired a substantial amount of medicinal ash and further developed their tentative, frightening friendship.

The relationship was a little concerning. Large, sharp-scaled dragons, no matter how exquisite in appearance, nor how easily flattered, were not meant to be friends of man - and neither were the small, feathery ones, for that matter, but those at least were less capable of causing wildfires, or terrorising towns and villages in the Midi. (They reminded him also of his aunt’s mousing cats, sometimes, when in his youth, they managed despite preventions to get inside of the dormitory of his lycée and take naps in his peers’ wardrobes.)

It wasn’t that he was afraid of them, really. He had, after all, heard it said that a dragon was more afraid of men than men were of dragons. In Paris, they were seen overhead quite often; the boarding areas at the outskirts of the city were generally well-maintained. At the medical school there was a small faction of students who were adamant of the healing properties of their venoms, blood, and even ash in regulating a man’s circulation - only the latter of which Joly had had the courage to acquire during his visits to the holding places in the last month. If at any point the alignment of his bed did not fulfill its purpose, he would have a nice stockpile with which to experiment. 

The dragons thought it was much less invasive for him to take their leftover ashes than their blood, at least. After his first visit, he had removed his fleam from his bag before going again, just in case... well.  Perhaps Joly would concede they were a little frightening, if pestered.

Indeed, that Bahorel was riding them in his spare time had come as a shock, although Joly supposed of all of his friends it would be Bahorel who had such hobbies. That Courfeyrac and his family owned them was somehow even more to process, even though he knew already that Lesgle had at one point kept a dragon of a smaller species. (Then he had lost it in a bet, as was his luck, for which Joly was secretly glad - he did not think he would do well hosting his friend’s tiny, fire-breathing beast so often as he stayed over.) Héloïse was turning out to be quite sweet, especially under - only the good Lord knew how he did it - Enjolras’s influence. 

Nonetheless, her talons looked quite sharp, and she had a habit of breathing sparks when irritable.

Given that several of his friends already were well acquainted with the creatures, he probably should have stopped to consider that there might be others among them who were also. As it was, when he entered the backroom of the Café Musain one night, he expected at least _some_ sympathy. 


End file.
